Samia Serageldin – The Cairo House (страница 2)

As I pass through the gate I nod to the couple from Minneapolis, a little awkwardly, because I can see in their eyes that I no longer belong to their world. At customs I push my cart right through the Nothing To Declare aisle. I scan the mass of dark, eager faces beyond the barrier at the exit. One does not distinguish black or white, only infinite gradations of gray in this most ethnically-mixed and color-blind of peoples. Within a few hours I will no longer notice such things, just as I will no longer see the inevitable film of desert dust in the stark sunshine, like a layer of ash over the gray buildings and the sooty cars, the leaves of the trees and the dark winter clothing of the people.

The muezzin’s call from the minaret wakes me at dawn my first morning in Cairo. I listen to the drawn-out echoes rising and falling in the stillness. I try to go back to sleep but the layers of noise start to build up outside the wooden shutters: first the birds twittering, then dogs barking, voices raised in greeting; finally the first car will set off the incessant honking that punctuates every minute of the day on the streets of Cairo.

I can hear Ibrahim the doorkeeper carrying out his morning ablutions at the tap in the courtyard under my window. His wooden clogs clap on the cobblestones, then the creaky faucet is turned off. I can imagine him winding his turban around his shriveled old head. Someone passing by in the street calls out a greeting: ‘Morning of jasmines!’ Ibrahim responds: ‘Morning of cream to you!’ The flowery greetings make me smile. Such small automatic courtesies are some of the few luxuries which even the poorest of the poor can afford.

As a child I used to sleep right through all this. I even used to sleep through the Bayram Feast sacrifice. Except for that one year, that year that was to be the last of the ‘good old days’.

There is a photo of me and my parents taken in the salon of the villa just before the Feast of the Sacrifice that year, 1961. Papa is holding a cigarette in one hand, his other hand on my shoulder. He chain-smoked Craven A’s; I remember the red and white box with the black cat. In the photo he has the broad-shouldered, dark looks of the Latin film stars of the fifties. His moustache is very neat, and his hair is slicked back. That style of suit, double-breasted, with boxy shoulders, was in style then, but I remember him wearing it a decade later and still looking impeccably tailored in it. He was that rare sort of man who carries himself well, without a hint of vanity.

Papa and I are standing behind Mama’s Aubusson bergère. Papa never changed that much – because he died young, I suppose – but Mama is almost unrecognizable in the photo. Her black hair is short, she has the thick straight brows, the red lipstick and string of pearls that were the ‘look’ of the period. Her features are too irregular to be photogenic, but her smile is confident. She is wearing a salmon, lace-encrusted tulle dress she kept for years after she stopped wearing it. She is at her slimmest in that photo, and although her shoulders and arms look creamy and plump, the boned bustier of that dress is tiny. I know because I tried it on when I was eighteen. I could only hook up the waist if I sucked in my breath, while the fabric of the hips and the bust hung loose on me.

In the photo I am standing with an arm around the back of Mama’s chair, head tilted to one side, one foot rubbing against the patent leather heel of the other foot. My shoulder-length hair is brushed back in a velvet Alice band. It was chestnut brown in those days and Mama rinsed it with camomile tea to bring out the highlights. I am wearing a sweater set over a short pleated skirt, and my legs are coltish and long. I am nine, on the verge of l’âge ingrat, as my governess called it, the awkward age.

Just before the photograph was taken, Mama had hurriedly tried to smooth my eyebrows.

‘Stand still, Gigi!’

She had wet the tip of her finger with her tongue and run her finger over my brows. I remember making a face. It’s the same face my son makes today when I take a sip from his drink, or in some other way betray the fact that I still don’t see him as his own person, physically separate from me.

Old photographs are like a deck of worn cards; you can try to read them like a fortune-teller at a fair, except in reverse: to read the past, rather than the future. With hindsight you recognize the people in them for what they were: the king, the joker, the knave, the hangman. The Pasha, of course, would be the King, the Sha’ib or Graybeard, as he is called in Arabic; Fangali the jester; Om Khalil’s black figure the hangman, turning up like an ill omen at unexpected junctures. But only with hindsight. While the cards are face down, you cannot tell what hand you’ve been dealt.

That photo of me with my parents was taken just before the Feast of the Sacrifice the year I turned nine. It was the last time we ever posed together for a family portrait.

The Feast of the Sacrifice must have been in winter that year. The sheep had arrived two days before amid much commotion, an incongruous sight in a residential neighborhood in Cairo. Sheep or cattle were sacrificed on the family estate, but it was also customary to carry out the ritual in Cairo. This imperative was never questioned: it was one of the many instances in our hybrid culture when Western norms were unhesitatingly sacrificed on the altar of tradition.

The Bayram Feast was meant to ransom one’s blessings, as Abraham did by his sacrifice. Health, wealth, and the greatest of blessings, children, could be withdrawn on a whim of the Giver. The Revolution of 1952 was nearly a decade old, and the Land Reform Act had stripped the bulk of our landholdings, but the worst was still around the corner for families like ours, and as yet unimaginable.

The distribution of the meat from the sacrificial beast was a symbolically intimate form of charity, sharing with dependents and mendicants the meat from one’s own table. For the sacrifice to be accepted, every detail of the ritual had to be carefully observed, such as the exact window of time during which it should be performed. That year that was to be the last of the good days, there was a hitch, the lapse of a fatal few minutes. In retrospect, it was an ill omen, and I was the one responsible for it.

I remember watching from the balcony when the van arrived with the two sheep in the back. The cook, his helper, the chauffeur and Ibrahim the Nubian doorkeeper then proceeded to drag the bleating, resisting beasts to the dog run where they would be penned until the morning of the feast.

There was a sudden commotion and panic; someone had forgotten to chain up the dog, who had come flying at the throat of the ram. The howling German shepherd was dragged away. Finally the sheep were safely enclosed. Two days later, before dawn on the day of the Feast, they would be taken to a shed in the backyard that was ordinarily used once a week by two washer-women who came to do the laundry, then on the following day by a man who came to do the ironing. The dog was also bathed there. But on that one day of the year, between dawn and daybreak, as tradition required for the sacrifice to be valid, the sheep would be slaughtered and skinned in that room, and the stench of blood would replace the scent of soap and starch. Then the walls and floor were hosed down and everything returned to normal for another year.

On the morning of the day before the Feast the bustle around the house had reached a pitch of controlled frenzy. In the salon, the Sudanese head-suffragi stood on top of a tall ladder, painstakingly unhooking the crystal drops from the chandelier, one by one, to be wiped with vinegar and water. Mama supervised, hair in curlers under a chiffon cap, wearing one of her favorite déshabillés: a faded, blue satin, shawl-collared affair with a sweeping skirt. Mama only dressed to go out, and then she spent at least an hour in front of her tulle-skirted vanity and her modern built-in closets.

The under-suffragi was pushing a heavy contraption across the parquet floor to polish it; twice a year the hardwood floors were hand-stripped with steel wool, cleaned, waxed, then polished with a chamois cloth weighed down by a massive brick of lead at the end of a stick. He pushed the unwieldy contraption forward and dragged it back with a clicking, sucking sound. One of the maids was using a bamboo duster to beat the back of a rug slung over the railing of the balcony.

I stood on the balcony at a safe distance from the dust raised by the maid, watching the arrival of the sheep. I remember the scent of jasmine from the bushes under the balcony – jasmine and dust. The cook came up to the balcony with some carrots to coax me to feed the lamb. A large, garrulous man with terrible burn scars on his chest, he was sweating from his recent efforts and the general excitement. All the household help seemed to go around with unusually dilated pupils in the days leading up to the Feast. ‘Blood lust’, my mother called it. The cook proudly pointed out the two animals to me, a ram and a lamb.